Matt Vagni is Co-Founder and CTO at Plain, the API-first platform which is designed to transform customer support for technology businesses.

Matt started out his career as a designer, and through experience at various companies transitioned to engineering. The first startup Matt joined would be Lyst - the fashion technology company and premium shopping app - where he was their 6th employee. Here, he saw the company grow quickly from a team of just 6, to 150 and millions in revenue.

During his 5 years at Lyst, Matt was responsible for design throughout the business and also helped to shape the company's product direction. Seeing Lyst grow from a fledgling team to a large multi-team organisation, Matt witnessed first-hand the challenges of rapid growth. This is also where he learnt about fundraising and cut his teeth in product, design and engineering.

In 2017, Matt left Lyst to become a founding member of Deliveroo’s UI infrastructure team. This was when he first crossed paths with customer service teams, and also got to know Simon. This would be Matt’s first experience in a company with a deep operations focus and who keenly invested in internal efficiency.

In this role, Matt was a product designer and engineer. It was here that Matt worked on building Deliveroo’s customer service tooling to help manage an ever increasing volume of support for riders, restaurants and customers. Working with thousands of agents at the helm, Matt was able to learn extensively about the way customer service operates at scale, and indeed how hard it is to integrate legacy CS platforms into the internal tech stack.

Matt would then go on to join LloydsDirect in 2018 - one of the biggest online pharmacies in the UK, as an engineer. Here, Matt was instrumental in creating all the tools and infrastructure to power the warehouse and deliveries.

During his time at LloydsDirect, Covid struck and Matt began exclusively working on customer support internally to weather the Covid-driven demand.  As technical lead, Matt helped to build an incredible internal tool which allowed CS advisors to quickly provide customer service by playing through workflows, which both helped train them and also let them provide consistent, clinically accurate support.

The customer service team went from 5-60 in just one year, while adding telephony and building a dedicated workflow driven customer service tool to power all interactions. This is where Matt fell in love with customer service as a problem space and once again ran into the difficulty involved in integrating legacy CS platforms.

Following the role at LloydsDirect, Matt would then go on to co-found Plain in 2020, alongside Simon Rohrbach, a former member of Deliveroo’s senior management team. The business has now secured a $6m investment co-led by Connect Ventures and Index Ventures, with participation from several prominent angel investors.

Working on in-house customer service tooling at Deliveroo and other organisations, Matt identified that customer support is a deeply human problem space. Finding a way to allow customer service advisors to be more efficient and happier in their jobs while also creating a good technical system, is something Matt is extremely passionate about following his own personal experiences as an engineer.

As a former product designer himself, Matt is a deep believer in blurring the line between product, engineering and design. His expectation is that every designer should code and every engineer view their decisions in the light of how it affects the experience for the Plain user. Matt believes that magic happens at the intersection of design and engineering - which is doubly true for Plain as a developer-focussed platform.

Matt’s ultimate goal is for customer service and engineering teams to be able to collaborate and help each other to provide a great customer experience. The opposite of many companies, where customer support is viewed as merely a cost to keep down rather than an opportunity for business growth.